Trial For Convert Unlikely

Confrontation Over Islamic Values Avoided

March 23, 2006|The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — An Afghan Muslim man who converted to Christianity now seems unlikely to be tried or executed for the crime of rejecting Islam, thus heading off a rapidly escalating confrontation between the Kabul government and its Western military and financial backers.

But the case of Abdul Rahman, officials and experts said, highlighted a raging struggle in Afghanistan over the role of Islam in the law and public policy. It has also exposed a wide gap in values between the conservative Muslim country and the international community that helped defend and rebuild it as a post-war democracy.

Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan's foreign minister, said the Afghan Embassy in Washington had received hundreds of letters, e-mails and calls from people protesting the prosecution of Rahman for converting to Christianity, a crime for which Afghan prosecutors and judges initially said he might be sentenced to death.

He also said that nearly all the NATO countries -- whose troops are in the process of replacing American military forces as the principal protectors of Afghanistan against Taliban and al-Qaida attacks -- had raised "extremely serious concerns" about the case.

Diplomats in several countries said Wednesday they had been assured Rahman would not be put to death, and Afghan diplomatic sources confirmed this. In Kabul, officials said Rahman, 46, might be mentally unstable and unfit to stand trial, an apparent sign that they are seeking to avert an international confrontation without giving ground on Islamic law.

But legal experts and human rights advocates said that the Rahman case exposes the deep and unresolved contradictions in Afghanistan's new constitution, and the difficulty of building a modern judiciary system that incorporates both Islamic legal principles and internationally enshrined individual rights.